We've made it this far and we haven't talked about authenticity at all. Authenticity is a crock. It's a trap. Authenticity exists to distract you. Why? Because authenticity is for friends and family. Authenticity is for the people who love you. For everybody else, professionals don't bring authenticity. They bring consistency. What does that mean? Well, your brand is a promise. Are you going to keep it or not? If I go to hear a musician and they genuinely, honestly have a horrible headache and a sore throat, do I want them to limp through the whole performance and be cranky? Or do I want them to pretend that they're the best versions of themselves and really bring it?
If I hire a lawyer, do I want that lawyer to be authentically brittle, difficult, short-tempered? Or would I like them to be consistently the lawyer they promised to be when I hired them? Consistency isn't easy, but consistency is easy to understand. Make a promise and keep it. Brands get in trouble when they hire ad agencies because ad agencies that are being rewarded for winning awards or rewarded for getting clicks break the consistency promise. And they show up with one-offs. They show up with ads that don't match the promise of the brand. They show up with gimmicks. A purple cow isn't a gimmick. A purple cow is a service. It's a service to say, I made this for you.
It's a service to say, this is who we are and what we believe in. This is the change we're here to make. do you want to come on this journey or not? But the social media platforms don't care about any of that. The social media platforms build algorithms that reward you for going off script, that reward you for picking a fight, that reward you for doing something that attracts a crowd. You know why? Because that makes the social media companies more money, not because it makes you succeed. So again, your hard work is to go to your boss, or if you're the client, go to yourself and ask these hard questions. What do we make? We don't make ads. We don't even make shoes.
We make a difference. We make choices. We make decisions. And that's hard to do. we've been indoctrinated not to show up to make decisions. So I'm going to go on a little tangent here as we come around. And the tangent is simple from my friend Annie Duke. Think really hard about whether you made a good decision in the last six months. Can you think of any time in the last six months you made a good decision? Did you make a good decision in the last six months? Did you? Yes. Everyone in the room agrees with me. Okay. So that good decision you made, Did it turn out well? If you're like everyone I've ever talked to, the answer is yes. We associate good decisions with good outcomes.
They're unrelated. If you buy a lottery ticket and you win, you made a bad decision and you got lucky. On the other hand, if you were driving very carefully and someone t-bones your car, you made a good decision and you got unlucky. we shouldn't confuse the two we get paralyzed about making creative decisions because we insist that the outcome is the only way to tell if it was a good decision this is not correct what a good decision is as a creative number one don't run out of time and don't run out of money if you run out of time you run out of money you're done number two are we strategically coherent it? Have we thought deeply about the change we seek to make and who's it for and what's it for?
That's the smallest viable audience, the network effect. If we do those things and it doesn't work, well, we've learned one thing that doesn't work. We might have gotten unlucky along the way, but we didn't make a bad decision. So what I'm pushing you to do here is think really hard about what does it mean to do your work as a professional, not just someone who's having fun making ads, but instead being very clear about the change we seek to make.